Craigslist also sent similar cease-and-desist letters to Carsabi (which Ars profiled in April 2012) and Mapskrieg, which use the site’s data to show used car listings and apartment listings, respectively. The three sites received similar letters from Craigslist’s counsel in June, alleging violations of Craigslist’s Terms of Service.

In the lawsuit (PDF) filed in a San Francisco federal court, Craigslist charges PadMapper with copyright infringement, breach of contract, trademark infringement, and unfair competition, among others. The lawsuit also names 3Taps, a San Francisco startup which openly scrapes Craigslist data and makes it available to other websites, and Does 1-25 as defendants.

The move seems rather odd for the for-profit company that has been a darling of the Bay Area Internet community for more than a decade. Most of us have used Craigslist to find all kinds of things, ranging from jobs to apartments and cars. (Heck, I found my cat on Craigslist’s free section seven years ago!) But if there’s one thing that has frustrated Internet users for years now, it's Craigslist’s lack of a proper interface, which these sites have attempted to bring to the fore.

Neither Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, nor its counsel or spokesperson have responded to repeated requests for comment. 3Taps has also not responded to multiple media inquiries.

"I can say that our culture has always been community-driven, and what they tell us, in large numbers and for years, [is] that their posts are not to be used by others for profit," Craig Newmark, the company's founder, wrote Ars in an e-mail last month, adding that as a customer service representative, and not the CEO, he could not speak for the company.

In an e-mail to Ars sent just after this article originally posted, Eric DeMenthon, PadMapper’s founder wrote that he only found out about the suit on Tuesday, and is currently looking for counsel now.

"3Taps doesn't get any data from Craigslist directly, they get it from the Google cache, which is the difference—before I was just crawling, à la Google," he wrote. "Since I'm not actually re-posting the content of the listings, just the facts about the listings, I figured (with legal advice) that there was no real copyright issue there."

PadMapper restored Craigslist listings in early July

Craigslist does provide a license to companies that want to use the Craigslist data for mobile devices. In the court filing, Craigslist says that “PadMapper was offered a license to such content, but did not accept the terms.”

In a blog post from earlier this month, Eric DeMenthon, PadMapper’s founder, wrote on a company blog that by using 3Taps’ data, that he would be able to re-include Craigslist data on his site, after having removed it in June.

“I’ve found a way to include them that I’m told is legally kosher since it doesn’t touch their servers at all, but it still seems somewhat dickish to go against their wishes in this, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they’ve done for the world,” he wrote. “Also, court seems like it’d be no fun.”

DeMenthon wrote to Ars to say that the license Craigslist was offering was a mobile-only app, and given that PadMapper is Web-only, it was a non-starter.

Craigslist forbids scraping

Craigslist makes all of its money from broker-listed apartments and job listings in a handful of cities around the world. Other ads don't generate revenue, a situation which has left some Craigslist fans scratching their heads.

“I don’t get how this hurts their bottom line,” said Lila Bailey, a fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Law, in a phone interview with Ars last month.

The question is, then, if Craigslist isn’t losing money, why would it be so strongly enforcing copyright on its listings that other companies want to make more usable? Bailey added that Craigslist’s own Terms of Service forbid scraping.

As the Terms themselves state: “Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of Craigslist or any content posted on Craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited.”

“What it says is that as a user, you give Craigslist basically a non-exclusive license to show data around the world, and you assign them the right to enforce other people for scraping,” Bailey added. “As a user, you’re not giving up rights to your data, but you’re giving them this proxy to see whether other people are ‘stealing’ it.”

DeMenthon added that he would be open to working with Craigslist, but that the company does not seem to want to.

"If Craigslist is willing to talk, I'd be willing to consider changing what they find objectionable about the site, if it's something other than showing search results from Craigslist," he added.

"If they're worried about PadLister as a competitor, I'd be willing to consider turning that off if I could work with Craigslist instead. I've always viewed that as a backup plan, and while PadMapper had Craigslist, I didn't have any strong reason to push that very hard, so I didn't. I obviously have a lot of thinking to do, but I'd love to actually be able to talk to them and see what would make them happy with PadMapper continuing to operate and serve users. PadMapper does make some money (the servers would bankrupt me otherwise), but much less than if my goal was just to make a lot of money. As far as amount, I'm the only person working full-time on the site, I pay myself below market rate, and [PadMapper] as a whole has just about broken even overall. This isn't due to lack of usage."

91 Reader Comments

Craigslist should just offer to hire the 3Taps and PadMapper developers and/or buy their companies. They're one of the few major service-providing sites that still have a crappy interface and no public API.

I wonder if this has to do with how MUCH data these services scrape from craigslist. The more data that they have to pull, the larger and more costly the bill is for Craigslist, which we already know doesn't push the profit-taking aspect of it's business that hard (and thus probably has to be somewhat more careful with how much its outlay is).

While I admire craigslist for never being concerned with profit, they've also never been concerned with putting out a good product and their existence inadvertently helped wipe out the newspaper industry. On the whole they may have done more harm than good and ironically haven't even made money in the process.

As for padmapper I found an apartment with them and they're fantastic. They're everything craigslist should be. If craigslist wants to remain devoid of features while giving away a free product it would be nice if they didn't stop other from filling in the gaping void their service leaves open.

The reason Craigslist doesn't want 3rd parties using this data is that although in the short term it increases the value of a Craigslist listing (since it is easier to find), in the long run, if users use PadMapper instead of other interfaces, it makes PadMapper effectively the owner of the users. This lets PadMapper have the potential to sell apartment ads directly, cutting Craigslist out of the picture.

Using ads off of Craigslist lets PadMapper get the listings it needs to draw user traffic. (PadMapper could have the best interface out there, but if it doesn't have listings why would anyone use it? And if no one uses it, why would anyone bother to list (or advertise) there?)

In a blog post from earlier this month, Eric DeMenthon, PadMapper’s founder, wrote on a company blog that by using 3Taps’ data, that he would be able to re-include Craigslist data on his site, after having removed it in June.

Quote:

As the Terms themselves state: “Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of Craigslist or any content posted on Craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited.”

It looks like PadMapper is liable under the "through intemediaries", "display" & "derivative use" items and 3Tap is liable under the "distribution" item in the TOS.. There are probably more things mentioned that can be applied.

Now it is up to the courts to decide if the TOS applies to people who have not agreed to the TOS. If they are found not liable due to not being bound by the TOS then they could still be found liable for copyright infringement by virtue of reusing Craiglist listings without permission. That would be a reach though unless they are reprinting substantially the same text that Craigslist uses. There are Fair Use exemptions for "substantial transformation" in a derivative work. An additional line of attack on PadMapper would be "Aiding and Abetting" 3Tap in their violation of the TOS.

It'd be a real shame if Padmapper was forced off. I recently used it to find a new apartment, and the search (via apartments.com, aapartmentrankings, craigslist, etc.) was a LOT more frustrating than when I discovered padmapper.

I'm rather surprised that nobody has stepped in to create a better service than Craigslist. It's user interface is ugly and less than user friendly.My gut feeling is that these lawsuits will do more harm to Craigslist than good--someone else (maybe one of the people they are suing, maybe not) now can come up with a similar service with a more intuitive UI and better search and eat Craigslist's lunch. Then Craigslist can disappear into the mists of time, like all such services that couldn't or wouldn't evolve with the times (MySpace, AOL, the WELL, dial-up...)

Good ole Craig. Pioneer of the Web and total Luddite. His stubbornness about adding things that would actually make the site useful would't be nearly as frustrating as if his free site hadn't run good apartment finding sites out of biz years ago. There use to be 2 or 3 good ones in SF but the last time I looked CL was the only game in town. And it is a pretty mediocre game.

You can't see how a classifieds list might have rights associated with it?

Not really, no; lists of factual data are typically not copyrightable, at least as I recall from the class I took on the subject in college.

Additionally, if PadMapper et al were just transforming the data and linking directly to the CL ads, rather than rehosting the listing text/images, then I can't see any chance of CL having a case; linking is not copyright infringement. If they were rehosting the text/images, then it's probably at least arguable; however, CL's terms of use seem to say that the copyright for the listings remains with the users, and CL merely has a non-exclusive license.

We saw recently that you cannot assign a "right to sue" without assigning any of the actual copy rights (that newspaper that was farming out its copyright suits), so it looks to me like CL doesn't have any kind of a case whatsoever.

In any case, it's completely idiotic of CL not to have updated their interface, at all, in the last decade; if they simply provided map-based interfaces (not that hard), there'd be no point in these other services existing in the first place. Suing others to defend your crappy business -- even if you win -- is a terrible way to go about things. Users who can't use PadMapper aren't going to blame PadMapper and go back to using CL, they're going to look for other sites/tools to find what they want.

I agree about craiglist just buying out one of these guys. A map interface to almost all of their forsale advertisements would be a huge improvement. They ought to see the rise of 3 such websites as a signal from their customers that a map interface is a valuable function. Shutting them down sure looks like unthinking monopolistic behaviour.

I attempted to use Craigslist to find a new apartment recently and wasn't able to because it was nearly impossible to limit the results to the area I wanted. People would throw in keywords just to get it to pop up in my search results even though it was nowhere near the location I wanted. It wasn't until I found PadMapper and was able to view and limit to a map that I was able to easily find an apartment without having to click on 2 or 3 links that were complete wastes of time for each real link.

Plus, PadMapper linked back to Craigslist so they still were utilized everytime and get the credit. There is obviously a need here and if they aren't willing to do it someone else will.

I wonder if this has to do with how MUCH data these services scrape from craigslist. The more data that they have to pull, the larger and more costly the bill is for Craigslist, which we already know doesn't push the profit-taking aspect of it's business that hard (and thus probably has to be somewhat more careful with how much its outlay is).

The data is coming from Google caches of the site, so there is literally no scraping involved of the actual Craigslist servers in this instance.

Even if PadMapper is in the wrong, I think Craigslist sucks and the developers behind it are being pretty shitty about the whole situation. They run the site for free, so no one can compete and since they were first they have a huge number of users. But the actively refuse to do anything to make the site not be as shitty as it is for things like apartments listings. People complain but their response is basically "We don't give a shit, the site's popular, we have no reason to make it not suck."

I never understood Craigslist reasoning / motive for maintaining their 1993 HTML interface. It's one of the hottest domain names, probably one of the most visited sites on the internet. Do they just don't care? What do those guys do all day anyway? Day jobs????

I'm rather surprised that nobody has stepped in to create a better service than Craigslist. It's user interface is ugly and less than user friendly.My gut feeling is that these lawsuits will do more harm to Craigslist than good--someone else (maybe one of the people they are suing, maybe not) now can come up with a similar service with a more intuitive UI and better search and eat Craigslist's lunch. Then Craigslist can disappear into the mists of time, like all such services that couldn't or wouldn't evolve with the times (MySpace, AOL, the WELL, dial-up...)

Do you not have Kijiji and Used Everywhere in the US? While the ads annoy, I found my new place using Kijiji because the local Craigslist was a barren wasteland. That and there are so many scammers on it, they started to outnumber the legitimate ads. Kijiji's map features are quite handy and help you narrow down the kind of place you're looking for.

When selling, I tend to get better responses through Used Everywhere sites than Craigslist.

I wonder if this has to do with how MUCH data these services scrape from craigslist. The more data that they have to pull, the larger and more costly the bill is for Craigslist, which we already know doesn't push the profit-taking aspect of it's business that hard (and thus probably has to be somewhat more careful with how much its outlay is).

The data is coming from Google caches of the site, so there is literally no scraping involved of the actual Craigslist servers in this instance.

Even if PadMapper is in the wrong, I think Craigslist sucks and the developers behind it are being pretty shitty about the whole situation. They run the site for free, so no one can compete and since they were first they have a huge number of users. But the actively refuse to do anything to make the site not be as shitty as it is for things like apartments listings. People complain but their response is basically "We don't give a shit, the site's popular, we have no reason to make it not suck."

I think they rely on a pretty strong following of uneducated internet users. you know, the ones who would call you to ask "how to open an ebay account" or "how does this bidding thing work again?" or "how do I turn on my computer, my monitor has an 'orange' light" kinda people...

I never understood Craigslist reasoning / motive for maintaining their 1993 HTML interface. It's one of the hottest domain names, probably one of the most visited sites on the internet. Do they just don't care? What do those guys do all day anyway? Day jobs????

Yeah, they're the 44th most accessed site globally, and 8th in the US. But yeah, my guess is they just don't care...

You can't see how a classifieds list might have rights associated with it?

Not really, no; lists of factual data are typically not copyrightable, at least as I recall from the class I took on the subject in college.

Additionally, if PadMapper et al were just transforming the data and linking directly to the CL ads, rather than rehosting the listing text/images, then I can't see any chance of CL having a case; linking is not copyright infringement. If they were rehosting the text/images, then it's probably at least arguable; however, CL's terms of use seem to say that the copyright for the listings remains with the users, and CL merely has a non-exclusive license.

We saw recently that you cannot assign a "right to sue" without assigning any of the actual copy rights (that newspaper that was farming out its copyright suits), so it looks to me like CL doesn't have any kind of a case whatsoever.

In any case, it's completely idiotic of CL not to have updated their interface, at all, in the last decade; if they simply provided map-based interfaces (not that hard), there'd be no point in these other services existing in the first place. Suing others to defend your crappy business -- even if you win -- is a terrible way to go about things. Users who can't use PadMapper aren't going to blame PadMapper and go back to using CL, they're going to look for other sites/tools to find what they want.

Copyright only applies to the aspects of a compilation of data that involve some minimum spark of creativity (the selection, arrangement, or organization of data). You're correct to note that protection for compilations is generally very thin. Regarding the question of copyright in a compilation, the on-point case is the Supreme Court's decision in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) (see in particular p358-59). Note also that the effort that goes into collecting the data (the 'sweat of the brow,' as it were), is not protected except for in one very narrow circumstance that is inapplicable here.

I don't see how the TOS can be relevant to PadMapper and 3Taps if they never contact Craigslist's servers, thus never being in a position to be bound to those terms.

For the courts to rule differently, it would be roughly akin to ruling that someone renting a car under the terms for that person to only use it for personal reasons, then the owner suing the renter's friend who, with permission from the renter, drove it as part of a taxi service.

Craigslist: following in the proud tradition of RIAA/MPAA. Do some good work for a few years, become completely beholden to an aging business model, sue anyone who threatens that business model. Product quality goes from top priority to a distant afterthought, but hey, maybe they'll be the first one to succeed in litigating the stoppage of time.

Lets say a new video site pops up. It's got a killer interface, and nothing from the last 10 years has anything on how sleek and fast it loads, runs, searches for content, etc. It makes YouTube seem like the old crusty fogy that it is, and every (in this example) is constantly complaining that YouTube needs to update it's interface. But YouTube doesn't update it's interface. It has millions of viewers.

New Video Site doesn't have millions of users. But it has a great interface. It gradually becomes more and more popular. And then YouTube sues it. Why?

Because New Video Site was using videos that were originally uploaded to YouTube. It's not simply linking. It has a copy of the video on it's own servers (and lets pretend they didn't actually scrape the content from YouTube, they pulled it from some imaginary cache or whatever, to keep the analogy the same), and claims that YouTube should let them continue.

And then we have people on the internet crying out: It's a better UI, so YouTube should let them! And it's not like YouTube owns the videos, the users do! Etc.

It'd be insane for YouTube to let them continue. They should sue. They are showing videos that were originally uploaded to YouTube. I upload a video to youtube, but that doesn't give vimeo the right to download and then host that same video on vimeo. New Video Site / Padmapper should stop trying to skip the step of: gain new users very very slowly as they trickle away from established players (YT/CL), and stop complaining about how their competition uses old UIs or wont let them have copies of the data that the users gave to them.

I post on CL/YouTube, and unless specifically asked/given notice otherwise, don't expect that information to end up on random site #23 whose trying to grow their traffic.

When I initially heard of this whole debate I thought it'd be something simple that most people would gloss over, considering how incredibly obvious it is that Padmapper is in the far, far wrong.

And yet, somehow, there are a significant number of people trying to argue that CL is in the wrong, and it seems to stem from general bias against Craigslist's UI. Ignoring right and wrong, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, due to a personal bias, on the internet, however could that possibly happen!??! /s

3Taps doesn't get any data from Craigslist directly, they get it from the Google cache, which is the difference—before I was just crawling, à la Google," he wrote. "Since I'm not actually re-posting the content of the listings, just the facts about the listings, I figured (with legal advice) that there was no real copyright issue there."

Hah! Their lawyer told them that if they get copyrighted data from Google's cache, then they aren't violating the copyright??!!

That's pretty funny. (I don't think a judge would think it is so funny though.)

I don't know why some company like PadMapper doesn't just copy the whole Craigslist ad entry system (with their map GUI). Craigslist is out of date. Time to replace it (not steal from it).

And yet, somehow, there are a significant number of people trying to argue that CL is in the wrong, and it seems to stem from general bias against Craigslist's UI. Ignoring right and wrong, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, due to a personal bias, on the internet, however could that possibly happen!??! /s

I'll be the first to say that Craigslist has the right to lock down their listings, prevent other people from adding value that they are too lazy/apathetic to add themselves, and to sue people who try to use their essentially stagnant business as fodder for innovative user experiences.

It's just that that philosophy never ends well. Craigslist has critical mass, and it will be hard to displace. But if they continue to fight against those who would improve their product, while also refusing to improve it themselves, they will be displaced. Legality and ethics aside, it is an incredibly dumb business move -- they're just milking a dying cow as long as possible.

And that's why they get no respect and are subject to these "biases" (also known as "opinions").

Hah! Their lawyer told them that if they get copyrighted data from Google's cache, then they aren't violating the copyright??!!

Copyright? For apartment listings? That's more than doubtful. And even if the copyright would be held by the creator and not craigslist. Their avenue is their TOS (which is unproven whether it'd actually hold in court), but if you never visit their site, they can't hardly be held responsible to accept the TOS.

Because New Video Site was using videos that were originally uploaded to YouTube. It's not simply linking. It has a copy of the video on it's own servers (and lets pretend they didn't actually scrape the content from YouTube, they pulled it from some imaginary cache or whatever, to keep the analogy the same), and claims that YouTube should let them continue.

Your analogy is completely stupid for many reasons, but I'll concentrate on the first. There is an enormous difference between copying an entire video, and pulling address data out of an apartment listing. That you would gloss over such an important point leads me to the conclusion that it is pointless to show the other flaws.

Hah! Their lawyer told them that if they get copyrighted data from Google's cache, then they aren't violating the copyright??!!

Copyright? For apartment listings? That's more than doubtful.

You thinks so? Newspapers historically made a lot of their money from their classified ads (before Craigslist came along)--both from the sale of the ad and from the money selling advertising to companies that want the eyes of all the people using the paper as a classified ad resource.

Craigslist makes its money the second way. Can you imagine if papers stole each others classifieds to bolster their image as a central resource? Lawsuits would be flying.

And in this case, that's what happened, and the lawsuits are indeed flying.

And yet, somehow, there are a significant number of people trying to argue that CL is in the wrong, and it seems to stem from general bias against Craigslist's UI. Ignoring right and wrong, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, due to a personal bias, on the internet, however could that possibly happen!??! /s

Except your analogy is extremely flawed, which is why people don't agree with you. PadMapper is essentially collecting metadata about apartment listings and then displaying that metadata. To fix your YouTube analogy, it would be like a site collecting a bunch of metadata about YouTube videos, such as duration, subject, etc. then making it much easier to search through YouTube videos to find videos you would enjoy and then linking back to the original videos on YouTube for you to watch them. You know who does exactly the same thing, and even makes ad revenue based on that metadata? Every search engine ever, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

PadMapper is essentially an apartment listing search engine using data from aggregated sources. The only difference between what PadMapper does with CL ads and what Google does with CL ads is the way in which it displays them. They both show summaries of the ads and link back to the original ad on CL. To me, if CL has a case against PadMapper, then it should also be suing Google.

Hah! Their lawyer told them that if they get copyrighted data from Google's cache, then they aren't violating the copyright??!!

Copyright? For apartment listings? That's more than doubtful.

You thinks so? Newspapers historically made a lot of their money from their classified ads (before Craigslist came along)--both from the sale of the ad and from the money selling advertising to companies that want the eyes of all the people using the paper as a classified ad resource.

Craigslist makes its money the second way. Can you imagine if papers stole each others classifieds to bolster their image as a central resource? Lawsuits would be flying.

And in this case, that's what happened, and the lawsuits are indeed flying.

Um, newspapers could not do that since those ads were half of their income. They'd be destroying themselves by doing that since nobody would bother to use their classifieds as by advertising with a competitor they would get the copying paper 'for free'.

Newspapers drew eyes to their ads and classifieds by increasing circulation, which was accomplished by being relevent in news reporting.

BTW, we can waste time picking apart the analogy, but at the end of the day CL is probably within their rights. That does not mean that this is a winning tactic however. This is potentially a classic case of winning the battle but losing the war.

You thinks so? Newspapers historically made a lot of their money from their classified ads (before Craigslist came along)--both from the sale of the ad and from the money selling advertising to companies that want the eyes of all the people using the paper as a classified ad resource.

Yes and what has that to do with copyright? I'd like to see how an apartment listing fulfills the minimal requirements for originality to get a copyright on it.. And even then the copyright would go to the creator of the listing and not craigslist.

Newspapers drew eyes to their ads and classifieds by increasing circulation, which was accomplished by being relevent in news reporting.

Have you ever seen those free news stands on the sidewalks of cities? They often have car and apartment magazines filled with ads--some low paid entries, and some high-paid car dealership entries.

If another magazine copied the low-paid ads, offered ad space to a bunch of dealerships, they could put out a competing product very cheaply because they wouldn't have to set up the infrastructure to gather the thousands of low-paid classified ads. They would also get sued.

So you can certainly point to some court case where that actually happened? Because if your point is that a standard apartment listing is copyrighted I fear we'll have to disagree about the amount of originality necessary for getting a copyright.